New York Times bestselling romance author Brenda Novak originally started writing after she discovered her child care provider was drugging her kids with cough syrup so they would sleep while she was gone. She decided she needed a job where she could write from home and began to write the kind of fiction she always loved. Her son suffers from type 1 diabetes and she has raised money every year in May for the past year to help find a cure.

Her most recent online auction just raised $359,815 for practical cure research. Brenda stipulated how the funds can be used after finding out about how some charities spend more money on overhead than for research to find an actual cure for the disease. She donated the funds to the Diabetes Research Institute. She donated $319,000 in 2012. Since she began the annual fundraiser her efforts have raised more than $2 million for the cure.

In a statement Brenda says that this is the first year that she is placing a restriction on her donation -- that all funds be used for a practical cure. That means a real, medical cure, not telling diabetics to check their sugar more often or monitor their carbohydrate intake. She worked with the independent, nonprofit Juvenile Diabetes Cure Alliance to define a practical cure and located and identify projects that have the best chance of helping her son and others in the near term.

Brenda explained, "The JDCA has been a great support in helping me channel my fundraising dollars into the research initiatives I really want to support.
It's wonderful to find a watch dog type entity that can guide charities toward the more hopeful projects -- ones with the potential to provide a practical cure in a reasonable amount of time to those with diabetes."

Brenda's latest book is When Lightning Strikes. For a limited time, the ebook version of the novel is available for $1.99 at Amazon.com.